Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Friday, November 05, 2010
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Now Available! Here Come the Groovies by Joseph Cooper & Andrew K. Peterson
LIVESTOCK EDITIONS, LIMITED presents Here Come the Groovies,
a collaborative poetry chap/book by Joseph Cooper & Andrew K. Peterson
ABOUT THE GROOVIES...
...Joe says, "Working with Andy is always maniacally educational. His profound insight into humanity makes even the most mundane moments scintillate with creative energy. Andy is a writer whose poetic aspirations, while certainly emotionally charged and deeply personal, selflessly reveal our various relational symmetries through playful experimentalism and a journalistic interrogation of truth. Groovies deeply embodies his brilliance and inventiveness, as much of this text was composed on bar patios stealing observations and menu specials, riding shotgun while transcribing our absurd dialogues, storefront advertisements, and coffee house sessions with MuuMuu House diatribes. Every Goon visitation is an effort to encapsulate, often a year's worth of phone conversations, poetic invention, suppressed delight, into about four days. This particular Buffalo venture culminated in dozens of pages of work, one hangover after another and interminable laughter. Though, never before have our adventures so honestly depicted the madness of these encounters. Here Come the Groovies is a compilation of poems delivered truly by friendship, frenzy, and an insatiable desire for the poetic."
...Andy says, "Working with Joe is a delightfully maddening challenge, because Joe is a poet and lives that way with gusto. Joe's action-speech is always provocative and personal (therefore universal) and solicits meaningful and intimate conversation. About what you said, what he said, what you thought he said, what he thought he heard you say about what you thought about what he said, etc. Mostly this book blossomed during my recent visit to Buffalo, & unspools that experience in a variety of unconscious collaborative forms: personal poem, found language, minimalist dialogue, invisible imitation, notation's dream, and mystery text. I hope these poems capture honest, collapsible joys and exhaustions of a friendship fueled by poetry, presence (over distance) and other ephemeral substances. A kiss for good company."
Groovy info: 76 pgs., 26 copies lettered A-Z & printed in October 2010: side-stitched, laser-printed on fine business paper with Coconut cardstock covers, & some extra-special limited covers printed on brown ("summer") stock.
Please contact either Joe or Andy with your mailing address to receive a complimentary copy!
Xoxo,
Livestock Editions
*
Joseph Cooper is currently writing and teaching in Buffalo, NY. He is the author of the full-length books TOUCH ME (BlazeVox 2009)and Autobiography of a Stutterer (BlazeVox 2007), as well as the chapbooks Memory/Incision (Dusie 2007), from Autobiography of a Stutterer (Big Game Books 2007), and Insuring the Wicker Man Shadow Created Delusion co-authored with Jared Hayes (Hot Whiskey 2005). He is the 2009 winner of the Equinox Chapbook Award from Fact-Simile Editions with his chapbook, Point of Intersection. In addition, his work has appeared in numerous journals including most recently The Ash Anthology, Counterexample poetics: Assemblage of Experimental Artistry, Bombay Gin, Brown Bagazine, Sentence: a Journal of Prose Poetics, Sex and Murder, and Sous Rature.
Andrew K. Peterson is the author of Museum of Thrown Objects (BlazeVox 2010), bonjour meriwether and the rabid maps (Fact-Simile, forthcoming 2010), and Between Here and the Telescopes (with Elizabeth Guthrie, Slumgullion 2008). He lives in Massachusetts.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
THE CROWNING
Lucy’s pond reflective skin
simulated a steady infusion of surprise
and delight.
She licked each finger absorbing civility and consciousness.
The sketch is fading. “I don’t believe it should be this way,
but I’ll do it anyway.”
“Isn’t it a lovely night Dynamo?”
“Did you say sentiment or sediment?”
He wouldn’t wear any clothes. Everything
was whispers, the corrosion of
satisfaction.
“You have lost almost everyone you love,” cried Lucy,
her fingers grappling
her belly. “Call my lover,
for your final seconds.”
“Your breath is voluntary
making you making me
love you, still.”
“Make me beautiful again,
without searching your
pockets for razors.”
Look at me, I am your reflection.
I’m always looking at you, for you.
Do not rush this ceremony, the deducing of shadows.
“I am happy here detached from my body.”
“There is nothing to stop this incongruity.”
Thump.
Thump.
“I am met with constant hostility.”
“You are a trained lover.”
Dynamo walked through the forest
dreary and heavy. “She is a pleasure.
She gives me pleasure.
She tries.” Father and Mother and Margaret deprived
of moisture choke down the mirth in death.
Their love became mercenary,
a savage trivia,
especially during sexual punishment.
Lucy is a watercolor,
a half-imagined thing,
a salvation of cloak and dagger.
Her mouth is a tower in flames,
smiling politely as the dead
peer out from inside. This is paradise,
a framed transparency
the position of her hips
stained in agony. This is paradise.
Everything has been said. Only the tribal confrontation
for tongue remains.
Yet, no city, no images come, no poppies in the rain, no severance,
no Jesus, and no chains.
“Only cover your eyes and sigh.”
It is called morning, a revolutionary pleasure,
the profile of a tongue in a knot.
“What is the truth about this landscape?”
“To whom do I sing as I wander up the path?”
“You are beautiful and mad, the mirror of a city.”
“Even when we are talking of ghosts,
with our clothes off, the afterlife
only strategic for demons,
our legs and our arms
make motion of these words,
the trees and the leaves
the dead and the living
the argument
continues.”
Lucy sank her teeth into Dynamo’s chest
and began sucking at the anti-image.
“What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.”[1]
“The afterlife is time travel.”
“Who invited you to dinner?”
“Be serious.”
“The screams of ghosts are vanishing
desperately in the company of disappearing ink.”
Dynamo awoke to the stench of horseshit,
a wafting invasion of spirit.
Lucy crawled into his armpit and
nestled her tiny body
into his caves and holes
and there disengaged from
his throat and loins
a treachery not quite her own.
“You wait this time in hunger.”
“You behave like a goddamned wheelbarrow.”
“All our faces have wings,
and all our wings are clipped.”
A dead forest is a prison, a riddle,
an angel watching foolishly
slick music
burning their backs
bent in morning.
“Around me you animate yourself.”
“I don’t know if there is time in this world
for miscommunication.”
Dear Lucy,
Being with you is like hunting
for a drunken comment
stranded on a dry tongue. At a great distance
you never tasted so strange. But when we mirror
each other, you become science fiction. The door
opens and you are merely domestic
skin disguised as art.
And upon your revision
at the edge of withdrawal
when deep emotion clings
to each squinting map of your youth
you will turn
mysteriously,
sigh,
a translation, or
a symbol an immediate telegram
a new language
letters and numbers,
a rose petal antiquated
with yesterday’s lover.
Remember eternity,
how directionless its graceful miles
lead between song and myth, how pure
the air was before our dreams,
nasty, short, and brittle
skulls half-eaten,
and the naked loss of metaphor
trembles
remembering the very bones
we have left behind.
Dynamo
“I love you, yet, I wander,
through your weary prose,
impatient for poetry.
I tell you darling,
this transformation,
this bursting forth,
a bouquet of flowers
bloodied from bullfighting
the substance of a single image. Adam and Eve
a comprehensive melancholy,
all the unemployed coffins,
the bridges and rooftops,
the drawings of still clouds,
I feel sorry for you,
unaware of your attachment,
to the few strings left to pull,
your teeth from the doorknob,
your hair shaven by shaky hand,
you eyeballs stitched into sand castles
your faces screaming at the tide, to love, to love,
unaccustomed to magic, the sacrificial loneliness
in beauty.
My poetry is suspicious of you,
born from dance,
like a dream of your watery eyes,
the silhouette of an imaginary rose.
There is nothing more desperate
than yesterday.”
This is paradise,
that boundary line
where love is outlined white,
liberated like a ghost,
many miles forward and backward
a childish grace answered by the last
abyss, a fake dream, a camera flash,
a time traveler invited to dinner
for the last time.
Lucy invited Dynamo inside. All of their children
crawled the floor with apples in their mouths,
a mild garnish lathered their bald flesh.
“Which do you prefer?”
“None.”
Lucy crossed and uncrossed her legs
in a dream of lilies, more beautiful than her
ravaged city. “Say nothing more. Say nothing
that will erect staircases between us.
Say nothing more.”
“We are both independent of images. We are liars.
I am covered in cloud,
and you are the taste of lemon
on my cunt. In these erotic musings
you are a beautiful boy
decayed an equivalent being
a crow cawing its head off,
a Valentine pretending
a bullet hole.”
“One touch of moonlight
stronger than my fingers tight
the unsuspected shooters glance
the proposition of a dance.”
“‘I hope that we shall find that we have one tongue,’[2]
that poems mistake pretending
for a hovering threat.”
Dynamo and Lucy lay upon the shared grave
of his family. “Could this have ever
been an alphabet, a place for answers?”
Lucy made a fire in her mouth and sucked
Dynamo’s skin until he was comforted
by bones, a real child
born a silhouette,
sucking every memory
from an imaginary rose.
Birds fly away.
A little boy in the forest splashes in the water
dancing,
listening to unfamiliar sounds.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Opening soon!
Cornered Rooms. Facing In Facing Out
Seminar: Poetic Corners. From Modernist Spaces to Homecomings
4 pm, 16 October 2010
Waterside Project Space, London
The exhibition "Cornered Rooms" is about corners and being cornered
within the context of contemporary architectural exit codes. The
exhibition will take place from 2 September - 17 October at Waterside
Project Space London. Works by the following artists will be shown
Hreinn Fridfinnsson (b.1943 Iceland), Karim Noureldin (b. 1967 Switzerland),
Anna Ostoya (b.1978 Poland), Damien Roach (b. 1980 England),
Egill Sæbjörnsson (b.1973 Iceland), and Patrick Tuttofuoco (b. 1974 Italy).
Near the end of the exhibition on 16 October there will be a seminar
with Stephan Trüby. Trüby is the author of the book "Exit-Architecture.
Design between War and Peace". He will speak about his concept, 'exit
architecture', and discuss how the corner is presented in "The Poetics of
a Wall Projection" by Jan Turnovsky. Alice Gavin a PhD candidate from
the London Consortium will speak about how Samuel Beckett and his
contemporaries install characters in tight corners, both architecturally
and ontologically. The poet and PhD candidate Elizabeth Guthrie will perform
"Dub-Notes - to Refrain (from Condition)" a body of text projected onto the wall.
"Dub-Notes" is the superimposition of the psyche, the dreamscape of the
dislocated voice within a room. As once said by Gaston Bachelard in
"The Poetics of Space": "Our house is our corner of the world. As has often
been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word."
The concept of the 'home' today as between longing and leaving will be explored
by the London Consortium PhD candidate Elia Ntaousani. As our relationship to space
has changed so have the dimensions of home and homeland. Ntaousani will open up a
dialogue between staying and leaving, homeland and homepage, of alterity and foreignness.
The goal is to engage the audience of artists and students of the London Consortium with the speakers in a form of dialogue within the context of the exhibition "Cornered Rooms".
http://watersideprojectspace.org/
Seminar: Poetic Corners. From Modernist Spaces to Homecomings
4 pm, 16 October 2010
Waterside Project Space, London
The exhibition "Cornered Rooms" is about corners and being cornered
within the context of contemporary architectural exit codes. The
exhibition will take place from 2 September - 17 October at Waterside
Project Space London. Works by the following artists will be shown
Hreinn Fridfinnsson (b.1943 Iceland), Karim Noureldin (b. 1967 Switzerland),
Anna Ostoya (b.1978 Poland), Damien Roach (b. 1980 England),
Egill Sæbjörnsson (b.1973 Iceland), and Patrick Tuttofuoco (b. 1974 Italy).
Near the end of the exhibition on 16 October there will be a seminar
with Stephan Trüby. Trüby is the author of the book "Exit-Architecture.
Design between War and Peace". He will speak about his concept, 'exit
architecture', and discuss how the corner is presented in "The Poetics of
a Wall Projection" by Jan Turnovsky. Alice Gavin a PhD candidate from
the London Consortium will speak about how Samuel Beckett and his
contemporaries install characters in tight corners, both architecturally
and ontologically. The poet and PhD candidate Elizabeth Guthrie will perform
"Dub-Notes - to Refrain (from Condition)" a body of text projected onto the wall.
"Dub-Notes" is the superimposition of the psyche, the dreamscape of the
dislocated voice within a room. As once said by Gaston Bachelard in
"The Poetics of Space": "Our house is our corner of the world. As has often
been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word."
The concept of the 'home' today as between longing and leaving will be explored
by the London Consortium PhD candidate Elia Ntaousani. As our relationship to space
has changed so have the dimensions of home and homeland. Ntaousani will open up a
dialogue between staying and leaving, homeland and homepage, of alterity and foreignness.
The goal is to engage the audience of artists and students of the London Consortium with the speakers in a form of dialogue within the context of the exhibition "Cornered Rooms".
http://watersideprojectspace.org/
Friday, June 11, 2010
Monday, May 31, 2010
3 Poems for Joe Cooper on His 31st Birthday
Alternating Lines of Joe Cooper and Maureen Owen
(Because we met in Maureen Owen's class)
Because we have gone on trying
pointing in different directions
stuborn laughs of sad error
bounced into the trees
without eliminations,
pointing to things absent
a slippage
left behind & where are my pyjamas
memorably laid out,
wrinkles and slides
quietly broken
tucked in a virtue saint of dropped futures
gods, many voices
snack food for the fishes
sleepy, it might snarl
glances parted the air struggling
constructing a
memory made of flower printed umbrellas
& oddly disturbing
dance like a drummer dreaming
toward the door we never opened
*
Things in Joe's Poetry (Sonnet)
teabags and rank and tones and grapefruit and
paint and stirrups and buoy and tongues and
prosthetics and tags and static and meanings
and gloves and perimeters and artiface and
rodent and masks and veterans and filth and rain
and cardboard and sandpaper and papier mache
and hedges and trampoline and cello and tooth-
paste and The Twilight Zone and bible and demon
and war and battery and fingers and Bambi and
body and telephone and navel and panel and
corpse and jewels and disposition and baseball
cap and thighs and bath and crack and
Trophies and photographs and thongs and
boxes and concert and grimace and mirror and knob
*
20 one-word homages for Joe
bohoemoth
.
o r G A S m !
.
A R I O S A
.
t t h i m b l e
.
Gram Parsons
.
trunbuckle
.
i c k l y
.
onsider
.
y s p h e m i a
.
k y j e r
.
e e c h
.
"tirer-les-marrons-du-feu"
.
i p s o
.
tugger
.
o ou g h
.
U R i n a l
.
p a b l u m
.
f r a g m e n
.
t o u l o u s e
.
m n y m p h
(Because we met in Maureen Owen's class)
Because we have gone on trying
pointing in different directions
stuborn laughs of sad error
bounced into the trees
without eliminations,
pointing to things absent
a slippage
left behind & where are my pyjamas
memorably laid out,
wrinkles and slides
quietly broken
tucked in a virtue saint of dropped futures
gods, many voices
snack food for the fishes
sleepy, it might snarl
glances parted the air struggling
constructing a
memory made of flower printed umbrellas
& oddly disturbing
dance like a drummer dreaming
toward the door we never opened
*
Things in Joe's Poetry (Sonnet)
teabags and rank and tones and grapefruit and
paint and stirrups and buoy and tongues and
prosthetics and tags and static and meanings
and gloves and perimeters and artiface and
rodent and masks and veterans and filth and rain
and cardboard and sandpaper and papier mache
and hedges and trampoline and cello and tooth-
paste and The Twilight Zone and bible and demon
and war and battery and fingers and Bambi and
body and telephone and navel and panel and
corpse and jewels and disposition and baseball
cap and thighs and bath and crack and
Trophies and photographs and thongs and
boxes and concert and grimace and mirror and knob
*
20 one-word homages for Joe
bohoemoth
.
o r G A S m !
.
A R I O S A
.
t t h i m b l e
.
Gram Parsons
.
trunbuckle
.
i c k l y
.
onsider
.
y s p h e m i a
.
k y j e r
.
e e c h
.
"tirer-les-marrons-du-feu"
.
i p s o
.
tugger
.
o ou g h
.
U R i n a l
.
p a b l u m
.
f r a g m e n
.
t o u l o u s e
.
m n y m p h
Friday, May 07, 2010
Thursday, May 06, 2010
Friday, April 30, 2010
Monday, April 26, 2010
Reading Tuesday Night @ Desperate for Love
Same time, different channel ~
http://poetryevents.blogspot.com/2010/04/desperate-for-love-tuesday-27th-april.html
Hope to see you there! ;)
xo
http://poetryevents.blogspot.com/2010/04/desperate-for-love-tuesday-27th-april.html
Hope to see you there! ;)
xo
Sunday, April 18, 2010
today while dancing through the kitchen she sang
"together
everyone achieves
mythology"
and she stops her dance
limbs suspended
looks at me
and adds quietly
"daddy, i don't know
what that means"
before she continues
her morning song
everyone achieves
mythology"
and she stops her dance
limbs suspended
looks at me
and adds quietly
"daddy, i don't know
what that means"
before she continues
her morning song
Tuesday, April 06, 2010
Monday, March 29, 2010
Now Available! Museum of Thrown Objects by Andrew K. Peterson
Greetings Friend, Happy Spring and All!
.
I'm excited to share this announcement with you for the release of my first full-length book of poems, Museum of Thrown Objects, just published by BlazeVox Books (Buffalo, 2010). The cover (above) features beautiful artwork by Atlanta-based artist Dayna Thacker.
*
*
Here’s what some beloved readers are saying about the book!
.
Andy Peterson's poetry combines visual art, both his own and some found elsewhere in the universe, with words redolent of mystery, thrillers, clues and riddles, and does so in a far more intelligent and sustaining way than present popular literature -- while not adopting any sense of "superiority" to same. Museum of Thrown Objects is a terrific "read" and a likewise "look" as well. -- Anselm Hollo, Guy Fawkes Day 2009
.
Imagine an ocean leaving its bed to hover above itself, where it should not be, to form a "silhouette" visible against an "afternoon." The technology of displacement is deployed, in Andrew Peterson's brilliant book, to create: not "delay" but "fusion." It makes sense, then, to build a museum out of artifacts that would, in the wetness beyond architecture, disappear by "low tide", but are instead "kept." Locked away in a decaying archive, "the thrown objects" form perverse alliances when the lights dim. Where the genitalia should be, for example, are "leafs and bugs." Intra-species, foaming, future-soaked, and with a "metallic corsage" delicately sewn to the wrist, the figures in Peterson's poems come to get you. And they do. They get you and take you somewhere until: "we are all here together in our new place." -- Bhanu Kapil
.
Museum of Thrown Objects exists as a poetic architectural phenomenon. Peterson constructs a kaleidoscopic wunderkammer of lyric, vispo, and conceptual experiments. Reading/Performing through its various wings I am activated into an environment of idiosyncratic relations. Things/Objects/Words have a collaged and artificial sensibility; as if Peterson is laughing at the overbearing seriousness of our contemporary museums with some incredulous anarchistic cut & paste. The difference between encasing an artwork behind glass as a stale and defined representation of some imagined mastery and staging things/objects/words in a dynamic and active performance of potentiality. This museum is enacting a perception embedded in things as much as in ourselves and, to me most importantly, things and selves in relationship to each other. Peterson, and the reader emerge throughout as poet-collectors (curators) in the process of mapping and performing transformation and relationship. Museum of Thrown Objects instructs the reader/performer: "Do not deny you are the work of art.". And so doing provides as it performs a dialogic and critical ethics of reading. We experience Peterson experiencing and thus find our own museums everywhere. -- Jared Hayes
*
I’ll say: been a joy building/cutting/pasting/curating this 'liquid architecture' from myriad found things of memory & place: errant ink petals, torn comic strips, flaky wallpaper, extinct flightless birds, rocks shaped like extinct flightless birds, transformed instruction manuals & diagrams, dream music, talking monuments & furniture, Oulipian place-mats, unsent love letters, puzzle pieces shaped like Idaho, ransom notes for missing bathroom materials, faded family photographs, errata, & other language/objects found & lost along-between there & here (from Boulder-Missoula-Arizona-desert-along-Massachusetts-coast-to-wherever-you-are...)
*
Ordering info: You can purchase from me directly for $12 (which is below publisher's price & includes shipping!) by visiting my blog, www.songfromyourhometown.blogspot.com, then clicking on the PayPal “Buy Now” button on the right-hand side. (If you’d rather not order through PayPal, please feel free to send a check to me: Andrew Peterson, PO Box 532, Marshfield Hills, MA 02051). Or, I heartily encourage you to purchase by visiting BlazeVox's website, here. Oh, & trades are great, too! (E-mail me!)
.
Thank you so much for all your love, friendship, support, & inspiration. Hope to see you soon!
.
Love, Andy
Sunday, March 21, 2010
iii Duchamp, Dickenson, Olson: Stutters of History (from Redell Olsen's dissertation)
.....the link between written and spoken language in highly visual terms. By creating visual "hinges" within words ("receiv / ing...h / ieroglyph") and extending spacing between words ("the mute vocables") the text self-reflexively notates a nearly aphaisic form of language. The reference to a "stuttering" extends this idea as the stutterer is forced to break words up into a series of linked and repeated sounds. Howe has even described her own critical work as stuttering, a stuttering that is "acoustically charged" with "a feeling of needing to write or say something but having no idea how to say it" (Keller "Interview" 27). The hinge is one of several devices that Howe uses to foreground a moment of delay, a stuttering space which fractures the languages of her intertexual sources, thereby calling their completeness and accuracy into question.
Duchamp's The Green Box (from which Howe takes her epigraph to Hinge Picture) consists of notes for his major work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Batchelors Even. Duchamp gave the piece the subtitle "Delay in Glass" (26):
Use "delay" instead of picture or painting on glass becomes in glass--but delay in glass does not mean picture on glass--It's merely a way of succeeding in no longer thinking that the thing in question is a picture--to make a delay of it in the most general way possible, not so much in the different meanings in which delay can be taken, but reather in their indecisive reunion "delay"-- / a delay in glass as you would say a poem in prose or a spittoon in silver. (26)
The materiality of the work is part of its meaning. Howe has made it clear just how central this art object is to her: "It would take a book for me to go on about what The Large Glass means to me...It is so two-sided. Synthesis, antithesis, reflection and delay" ("Dialogue" 286). A delay in glass is directly comparable to Howe's stutter because it is a hesitation in words that emphasises the difference between phonemes and morphemes, a space that emphasises the materiality of utterance itself. To think of the poem as occupying a space akin to a delay in glass gives Howe a position from which to criticise conventional representational structures. In The Western Borders (1976), she writes, "Enchantment like lies can alter the sight of the beholder / but not the reality of the thing seen" (n.p.) Howe's texts resist the enchantment of conventional modes of representation, modes which attempt to construct a direct link between language and the world that it purports to represent. Just as Duchamp's "Delay in Glass" call attention to its own materiality by suggesting that the large glass does not refer to something outside itself ("no longer thinking that the thing in question is a picture"), Howe's stutter calls attention to the materiality of language, thereby calling into question language's capacity to represent a referent. In effect the visually notated stutter in Howe's text offers a critique of the natural voice as the bearer of truth.
In this sense of stuttering voices and practices that seem to face certain obscurity which continually inderlies Howe's work. Her desire to invest time in "a writing practice that seems unacceptable" ("Dialogue" 380) is confirmed by her interest in Emily Dickinson. Over her life-time, Dickinson produced a series of hand-written poems in small sewn packets. These were subsequently torn apart by editors and converted into type-written approximations of their originals. Early editions of Dickinson's work superimposed a standardised punctuation onto the texts and reordered the fascicles according to themes chosen by the editors themselves, who also dismissed the multiple variants of both the texts and the individual lines within poems. For Howe, the recovery of Dickinson depends on a recovery of these verbal and visual elements from the original texts. This is obviously a difficult task. Howe reads Dickinson's poems as if they were delays in paper, moments of spaces of suspended communication that are dependent on their material manifestation (handwriting on paper) for their effect. Mistrustful of previous editorial strategies, Howe asks "Can quick particularities of calligraphic expression ever be converted to type?" (Birth 4). She struggles to reclaim a writing practice which resists the standardisation of canonical norms and so is threatened with loss and erasure.
Howe describes the way in which Dickinson created her own hybrid discourse from "higher' female education" and combined it with what was termed "unladylike" outside reading:
Pulling pieces of geometry, geology, alchemy, philosophy, politics, biography, biology, mythology, and philosophy from alien territory, a 'sheltered' woman audaciously invented a new grammar grounded in humility and hestiation. (My 21)
It is this moment of hesitation that is according to Howe gendered: "He may pause but he must not hesitate" she quotes from Ruskin (21-22). The stutter is an acoustic or phonic moment of hesitation, but it is also for Howe a kind of visual mark. Like the stutter, the visual mark (when "read" as language) falls outside the recoverable space of meaning, it does not seem to stand for anything beyond itself. Howe highlights this connection in her discussion of Hawthorne's story "The Birth-Mark", from which her own book of essays takes its name:
One day, very soon after their marriage, Alymer sat gazing at his wife, with a trouble in his countenance that grew stronger, until he spoke.
"Georgina," said he, "has it ever occurred to you that the mark upon your cheek might be removed?"
"No, indeed," said she, smiling; but perceiving the seriousness of his manner, she blushed deeply. "To tell you the truth, it has been so often called a charm, that I was simple enough to imagine it might be so."
"Ah, upon another face, perhaps it might," replied her husband. "But never on yours! No, dearest Georgina, you came so nearly perfect from the hand of Nature, that his slightest possible defect--which we hesitate whether to term a defect or beauty--shocks me, as being the visible mark of earthly imperfection. (Hawthorne qtd. in My 7)
The husband's wish to edit the face of his wife parallels the relationship of editorial control and censure that Howe seeks to address in her critical work on Dickinson. Howe challenges a tradition of editorial scholarship which has repeatedly removed and expunged the visual marking of Dickinson's texts, precisely because their characteristic features were not apparently assimilable into the recognizable orders of what could be read as language. For Howe this issue of editorial control is certainly "a gender issue" (Keller 33)
He might pause, She hesitated. Sexual, racial, and geographical separation are at the heart of Definition. Tragic and eternal dichotomy--if we concern ourselves with the deepest Reality, is this world of the imagination the same for men and women? (My 21-22)
As this passage suggests, Howe's stance toward the reclamation of a hybrid scripto-visual practice has profound implications for the feminine writing subject. Howe begins her book, My Emily Dickinson, by asserting that she will contradict her own epigraph from William Carlos Williams:
It is the women above all-there never have been women, save pioneer Katies; not one flower save some moonflower Poe may have seen, or an unripe child. Poets? Where? They are the test. But a true woman in flower, never. Emily Dickinson, starving of passion in her father's garden, is the very nearest we have ever been--starving.
Never a woman: never a poet. That's axiom. Never a poet saw sun here. (Williams qtd. in My 6)
At the same time, Howe makes it quite clear that "A poet is never just a woman or a man" (7): "We are all both genders. There is nothing more boring than stridently male poetry and stridently female poetry" (Birth 172). Gender effects language, but this is not the whole story: "we constantly confront issues of difference, distance, and absence, when we write" (My 13). And it is this distance which is also found in the scripto-visual notation of a stutter, a hesitation, a stammer--that which falls outside the laws of speech and of writing into the realm of the visual.
Kathleen Fraser's influential essay "Translating the Unspeakable: Visual Poetics, as Projected through Olson's 'Field' into Current Female Writing Practice" argues that a number of women writers (Myung Mi Kim, Hannah Weiner, Laura Moriarty, Susan Howe and Barbara Guest) adopted Charles Olson's visual use of the page, its "spatial, historical and ethical margins" (644), to configure an alternative feminine writing practice. As Fraser points out, Olson offered an alternative to "the narcissistically probing, psychological defining of self" typified in the work of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Olson's visual and typographical experiments seemed to coincide with their "scepticism towards any fixed rhetoric" (644). Fraser saw in Olson someone who resisted the "prescription of authorship as an exclusively unitary proposition" (644). According to Fraser, Olson offered contemporary women writers "another kind of use value" for language, one that allowed for a more complex subjectivity that might be able to incorporate the inconsistencies of temorality; "its continuous broken surfaces, its day-by-day graphs of interruption and careening" (644).
Like Olsen, Howe is drawn to the visual notation of a stutter. At first sight it would appear that the two of them have much in common. The conception of the page as a visual field connects Howe to Olsen's poetics as he describes them in "Projective Verse." Howe clearly admires Olsen for his visual use of the page:
At his best, Olsen lets words and groups of words, even letter arrangements and spelling accidents shoot suggestions at each other, as if the page were a canvas and the motion of words--reality across surface. Optical effects, seemingly chance encounters of letters, are a BRIDGE. Through a screen of juxtapositions one dynamic image may be visible. ("Where" 6)
For Olson, the field of the page consists of "OBJECTS", syllables, lines, images and sounds in relation to one another. Following Robert Creely, Olson asserts "FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT," i.e. the logic of the poem to dictate its rules (Selected 16). This synthesis of form and content emphasises the importance of process in generating meaning. Olson further links the poem's processual character to the breath. The line on the page is to be governed by the direct relationship between the ear and the breath:
But breath is man's special qualification as animal. Sound is a dimension he has extended. Language is one of his proudest acts. And when a poet rests in these as they are in himself (in his physiology, if you like, but the life in him, for all than) then he chooses to speak from these roots, works in that area where nature has given him size, projective size. (25)
In Olson the stutter is also connected to his stress on the syllable which he describes as "these particles of sound" whose juxtaposition is as important as "the series of the words which they compose" (18). Olson connects the visual look of the poem on the page directly to the body itself. His model for the ideal line is the male body at the peak of its physique, as it "gives voice." Similarly, he clearly connects the visual potential of the page and the mark-making capabilities of the type-writer to the acoustic pauses of the breath:
If a contemporary poet leaves a space as long as the phrase before it, he means that space to be held, by the breath, an equal length of time. If he suspends a word or syllable at the ends of a line (this was most Cummings' addition) he means that time to pass that it takes the eye--that hair of time suspended--to pick up the next line. If he wishes a pause so light it hardly separates the words, yet does not want a comma--which is an interruption of the meaning rather than the sounding of the line--follow him when he uses a symbol the type-writer has ready to hand:
'What does not change / is the will to change' (Selected 23)
It is these visual "interuptions" on the page, this series of stutters between meanings, which suggest a link between Olson's and Howe's scripto-visual practice.
In any interview with Cole Swenson, Howe describes the "immediate shock of recognition" that she felt on encountering Olson's work: "It was his voracious need to gather "facts", to find something, a quotation, a place, a name, a date, some documentary evidence in regard to place" (381). Like Olson, Howe is concerned with the marking and bounding of territory, the representation of the self in an already inhabited landscape. However, there are clearly distinct gender problems with making too close an identification between Howe and Olson. Howe maintains that Olson's writing is "for a woman, an indeterminate, sometimes graphically violent force" ("Charles" 168):
I am a poet. I know Charles Olson's writing encouraged me to be a radical poet. When I was writing my first poems I recall he showed me what to do. Had he been my teacher in real life, I know he would have stopped my voice. ("Charles" 166) Furthermore, her work suggests a different relationship to the visual in relation to history and to the voice to that found in Olson because of her attention to the articulation, reframing, and representation of the feminine subject.
Duchamp's The Green Box (from which Howe takes her epigraph to Hinge Picture) consists of notes for his major work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Batchelors Even. Duchamp gave the piece the subtitle "Delay in Glass" (26):
Use "delay" instead of picture or painting on glass becomes in glass--but delay in glass does not mean picture on glass--It's merely a way of succeeding in no longer thinking that the thing in question is a picture--to make a delay of it in the most general way possible, not so much in the different meanings in which delay can be taken, but reather in their indecisive reunion "delay"-- / a delay in glass as you would say a poem in prose or a spittoon in silver. (26)
The materiality of the work is part of its meaning. Howe has made it clear just how central this art object is to her: "It would take a book for me to go on about what The Large Glass means to me...It is so two-sided. Synthesis, antithesis, reflection and delay" ("Dialogue" 286). A delay in glass is directly comparable to Howe's stutter because it is a hesitation in words that emphasises the difference between phonemes and morphemes, a space that emphasises the materiality of utterance itself. To think of the poem as occupying a space akin to a delay in glass gives Howe a position from which to criticise conventional representational structures. In The Western Borders (1976), she writes, "Enchantment like lies can alter the sight of the beholder / but not the reality of the thing seen" (n.p.) Howe's texts resist the enchantment of conventional modes of representation, modes which attempt to construct a direct link between language and the world that it purports to represent. Just as Duchamp's "Delay in Glass" call attention to its own materiality by suggesting that the large glass does not refer to something outside itself ("no longer thinking that the thing in question is a picture"), Howe's stutter calls attention to the materiality of language, thereby calling into question language's capacity to represent a referent. In effect the visually notated stutter in Howe's text offers a critique of the natural voice as the bearer of truth.
In this sense of stuttering voices and practices that seem to face certain obscurity which continually inderlies Howe's work. Her desire to invest time in "a writing practice that seems unacceptable" ("Dialogue" 380) is confirmed by her interest in Emily Dickinson. Over her life-time, Dickinson produced a series of hand-written poems in small sewn packets. These were subsequently torn apart by editors and converted into type-written approximations of their originals. Early editions of Dickinson's work superimposed a standardised punctuation onto the texts and reordered the fascicles according to themes chosen by the editors themselves, who also dismissed the multiple variants of both the texts and the individual lines within poems. For Howe, the recovery of Dickinson depends on a recovery of these verbal and visual elements from the original texts. This is obviously a difficult task. Howe reads Dickinson's poems as if they were delays in paper, moments of spaces of suspended communication that are dependent on their material manifestation (handwriting on paper) for their effect. Mistrustful of previous editorial strategies, Howe asks "Can quick particularities of calligraphic expression ever be converted to type?" (Birth 4). She struggles to reclaim a writing practice which resists the standardisation of canonical norms and so is threatened with loss and erasure.
Howe describes the way in which Dickinson created her own hybrid discourse from "higher' female education" and combined it with what was termed "unladylike" outside reading:
Pulling pieces of geometry, geology, alchemy, philosophy, politics, biography, biology, mythology, and philosophy from alien territory, a 'sheltered' woman audaciously invented a new grammar grounded in humility and hestiation. (My 21)
It is this moment of hesitation that is according to Howe gendered: "He may pause but he must not hesitate" she quotes from Ruskin (21-22). The stutter is an acoustic or phonic moment of hesitation, but it is also for Howe a kind of visual mark. Like the stutter, the visual mark (when "read" as language) falls outside the recoverable space of meaning, it does not seem to stand for anything beyond itself. Howe highlights this connection in her discussion of Hawthorne's story "The Birth-Mark", from which her own book of essays takes its name:
One day, very soon after their marriage, Alymer sat gazing at his wife, with a trouble in his countenance that grew stronger, until he spoke.
"Georgina," said he, "has it ever occurred to you that the mark upon your cheek might be removed?"
"No, indeed," said she, smiling; but perceiving the seriousness of his manner, she blushed deeply. "To tell you the truth, it has been so often called a charm, that I was simple enough to imagine it might be so."
"Ah, upon another face, perhaps it might," replied her husband. "But never on yours! No, dearest Georgina, you came so nearly perfect from the hand of Nature, that his slightest possible defect--which we hesitate whether to term a defect or beauty--shocks me, as being the visible mark of earthly imperfection. (Hawthorne qtd. in My 7)
The husband's wish to edit the face of his wife parallels the relationship of editorial control and censure that Howe seeks to address in her critical work on Dickinson. Howe challenges a tradition of editorial scholarship which has repeatedly removed and expunged the visual marking of Dickinson's texts, precisely because their characteristic features were not apparently assimilable into the recognizable orders of what could be read as language. For Howe this issue of editorial control is certainly "a gender issue" (Keller 33)
He might pause, She hesitated. Sexual, racial, and geographical separation are at the heart of Definition. Tragic and eternal dichotomy--if we concern ourselves with the deepest Reality, is this world of the imagination the same for men and women? (My 21-22)
As this passage suggests, Howe's stance toward the reclamation of a hybrid scripto-visual practice has profound implications for the feminine writing subject. Howe begins her book, My Emily Dickinson, by asserting that she will contradict her own epigraph from William Carlos Williams:
It is the women above all-there never have been women, save pioneer Katies; not one flower save some moonflower Poe may have seen, or an unripe child. Poets? Where? They are the test. But a true woman in flower, never. Emily Dickinson, starving of passion in her father's garden, is the very nearest we have ever been--starving.
Never a woman: never a poet. That's axiom. Never a poet saw sun here. (Williams qtd. in My 6)
At the same time, Howe makes it quite clear that "A poet is never just a woman or a man" (7): "We are all both genders. There is nothing more boring than stridently male poetry and stridently female poetry" (Birth 172). Gender effects language, but this is not the whole story: "we constantly confront issues of difference, distance, and absence, when we write" (My 13). And it is this distance which is also found in the scripto-visual notation of a stutter, a hesitation, a stammer--that which falls outside the laws of speech and of writing into the realm of the visual.
Kathleen Fraser's influential essay "Translating the Unspeakable: Visual Poetics, as Projected through Olson's 'Field' into Current Female Writing Practice" argues that a number of women writers (Myung Mi Kim, Hannah Weiner, Laura Moriarty, Susan Howe and Barbara Guest) adopted Charles Olson's visual use of the page, its "spatial, historical and ethical margins" (644), to configure an alternative feminine writing practice. As Fraser points out, Olson offered an alternative to "the narcissistically probing, psychological defining of self" typified in the work of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Olson's visual and typographical experiments seemed to coincide with their "scepticism towards any fixed rhetoric" (644). Fraser saw in Olson someone who resisted the "prescription of authorship as an exclusively unitary proposition" (644). According to Fraser, Olson offered contemporary women writers "another kind of use value" for language, one that allowed for a more complex subjectivity that might be able to incorporate the inconsistencies of temorality; "its continuous broken surfaces, its day-by-day graphs of interruption and careening" (644).
Like Olsen, Howe is drawn to the visual notation of a stutter. At first sight it would appear that the two of them have much in common. The conception of the page as a visual field connects Howe to Olsen's poetics as he describes them in "Projective Verse." Howe clearly admires Olsen for his visual use of the page:
At his best, Olsen lets words and groups of words, even letter arrangements and spelling accidents shoot suggestions at each other, as if the page were a canvas and the motion of words--reality across surface. Optical effects, seemingly chance encounters of letters, are a BRIDGE. Through a screen of juxtapositions one dynamic image may be visible. ("Where" 6)
For Olson, the field of the page consists of "OBJECTS", syllables, lines, images and sounds in relation to one another. Following Robert Creely, Olson asserts "FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT," i.e. the logic of the poem to dictate its rules (Selected 16). This synthesis of form and content emphasises the importance of process in generating meaning. Olson further links the poem's processual character to the breath. The line on the page is to be governed by the direct relationship between the ear and the breath:
But breath is man's special qualification as animal. Sound is a dimension he has extended. Language is one of his proudest acts. And when a poet rests in these as they are in himself (in his physiology, if you like, but the life in him, for all than) then he chooses to speak from these roots, works in that area where nature has given him size, projective size. (25)
In Olson the stutter is also connected to his stress on the syllable which he describes as "these particles of sound" whose juxtaposition is as important as "the series of the words which they compose" (18). Olson connects the visual look of the poem on the page directly to the body itself. His model for the ideal line is the male body at the peak of its physique, as it "gives voice." Similarly, he clearly connects the visual potential of the page and the mark-making capabilities of the type-writer to the acoustic pauses of the breath:
If a contemporary poet leaves a space as long as the phrase before it, he means that space to be held, by the breath, an equal length of time. If he suspends a word or syllable at the ends of a line (this was most Cummings' addition) he means that time to pass that it takes the eye--that hair of time suspended--to pick up the next line. If he wishes a pause so light it hardly separates the words, yet does not want a comma--which is an interruption of the meaning rather than the sounding of the line--follow him when he uses a symbol the type-writer has ready to hand:
'What does not change / is the will to change' (Selected 23)
It is these visual "interuptions" on the page, this series of stutters between meanings, which suggest a link between Olson's and Howe's scripto-visual practice.
In any interview with Cole Swenson, Howe describes the "immediate shock of recognition" that she felt on encountering Olson's work: "It was his voracious need to gather "facts", to find something, a quotation, a place, a name, a date, some documentary evidence in regard to place" (381). Like Olson, Howe is concerned with the marking and bounding of territory, the representation of the self in an already inhabited landscape. However, there are clearly distinct gender problems with making too close an identification between Howe and Olson. Howe maintains that Olson's writing is "for a woman, an indeterminate, sometimes graphically violent force" ("Charles" 168):
I am a poet. I know Charles Olson's writing encouraged me to be a radical poet. When I was writing my first poems I recall he showed me what to do. Had he been my teacher in real life, I know he would have stopped my voice. ("Charles" 166) Furthermore, her work suggests a different relationship to the visual in relation to history and to the voice to that found in Olson because of her attention to the articulation, reframing, and representation of the feminine subject.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
By Jared Hayes...HA!
Bob:
Play that plinkety Plinko Pirate Patrick!
Patrick playing Plinko for pirate’s booty!
Patrick, do you have a pet parrot?
Pirate Patrick I do believe…you’ve plinkety
plinkoed your way to a fine …FINE (wink, handshake) booty!
[PIRATE PATRICK] playing plinko
plinkety.plink.plink.plink.parrot.pet.pet.pirate.Patrick.plink.
Patrick.plinko.plinkety.parrot.plink.plinkety.pirate.plinkety.
parrot.pet.pie.plink.pink.parrot.pie.pie.pirate.plinkety.plink.
plink.plinko.plinkplink.plinkety.Patrick.plinkety.plink.plink.
plinko.parrot.plink.plink.pirate.plinko.plink.plink.plinkety.
plinko.Patrick.plink.plink.plinkety.plinko.Patrick.plinkety.
plinkety.plinko.pirate.plink.plink.parrotpet.plinko.plinkety.
plink.plink.plinko.petparrot.Patrick.plink.plink.plinkoplink.
pirate.pirate.Patrick.Patrick.plinkety.plinkety.plinko.plinko.
par.par.plink.parrot.pirate.plink.plink.plinkety.plinko.plink.
pie.pie.plink.parrot.pet.pie.pie.plinkety.plink.plink.plinkety.
plink.plink.pirate.Patrick.plinkety.pie.plinko.plinko.plinko.
Play that plinkety Plinko Pirate Patrick!
Patrick playing Plinko for pirate’s booty!
Patrick, do you have a pet parrot?
Pirate Patrick I do believe…you’ve plinkety
plinkoed your way to a fine …FINE (wink, handshake) booty!
[PIRATE PATRICK] playing plinko
plinkety.plink.plink.plink.parrot.pet.pet.pirate.Patrick.plink.
Patrick.plinko.plinkety.parrot.plink.plinkety.pirate.plinkety.
parrot.pet.pie.plink.pink.parrot.pie.pie.pirate.plinkety.plink.
plink.plinko.plinkplink.plinkety.Patrick.plinkety.plink.plink.
plinko.parrot.plink.plink.pirate.plinko.plink.plink.plinkety.
plinko.Patrick.plink.plink.plinkety.plinko.Patrick.plinkety.
plinkety.plinko.pirate.plink.plink.parrotpet.plinko.plinkety.
plink.plink.plinko.petparrot.Patrick.plink.plink.plinkoplink.
pirate.pirate.Patrick.Patrick.plinkety.plinkety.plinko.plinko.
par.par.plink.parrot.pirate.plink.plink.plinkety.plinko.plink.
pie.pie.plink.parrot.pet.pie.pie.plinkety.plink.plink.plinkety.
plink.plink.pirate.Patrick.plinkety.pie.plinko.plinko.plinko.
Monday, March 08, 2010
ANNOUNCEMENT from The Offending Adam
Announcing Issue 006 from The Offending Adam (http://www.theoffendingadam.com/). Issue 006 features a serialized poem from Andrew K. Peterson, spread out from Part I on Monday through Part IV on Thursday. Come back each day and don't miss a single installment.
.
While you're around, if you missed our previous issues, don't worry. All of our contributions remain archived and accessible on our site, including:
005: Schlesinger & Archambeau
004: Lemon & Bendall & O’Brien
003: Hicok & Schaberg & Yakich
002: Steensen & Long
001: Beachy-Quick & Reddy & Stobb & Sweeney & Clark
.
We are also excited to announce our forthcoming first limited edition chapbook, Canto. We are offering a special pre-order rate of $8 ($2 off the list price) + $2 shipping and handling. Get a preview of the first three cantos in the book (http://www.theoffendingadam.com/2010/02/01/from-canto). Learn more about the chapbook, and check out the cover art by Shawn Stucky, in our bookstore (http://www.theoffendingadam.com/store/).
.
Currently we are reading submissions for new writing, essays, book reviews, and feature projects. We will be reading between now and April 15, so get us your work soon! You can review our submissions guidelines at http://www.theoffendingadam.com/submit/ So we invite you to drop by this week to http://www.theoffendingadam.com/ as Issue 006 arrives.
.
Bookmark or add us to your reader so that you don't miss a single issue of content. And of course, we encourage you to pass the word of the launch along by passing along this message to anyone you think would be interested or post a note on facebook or a blog.
.
If you have any questions, comments, or concerns or if you want to contact us for any reason, please email us at editors@theoffendingadam.com.
.
The editors of The Offending Adam
Andrew Wessels
Cody Todd
Nik De Dominic
Ryan Winet
.
While you're around, if you missed our previous issues, don't worry. All of our contributions remain archived and accessible on our site, including:
005: Schlesinger & Archambeau
004: Lemon & Bendall & O’Brien
003: Hicok & Schaberg & Yakich
002: Steensen & Long
001: Beachy-Quick & Reddy & Stobb & Sweeney & Clark
.
We are also excited to announce our forthcoming first limited edition chapbook, Canto. We are offering a special pre-order rate of $8 ($2 off the list price) + $2 shipping and handling. Get a preview of the first three cantos in the book (http://www.theoffendingadam.com/2010/02/01/from-canto). Learn more about the chapbook, and check out the cover art by Shawn Stucky, in our bookstore (http://www.theoffendingadam.com/store/).
.
Currently we are reading submissions for new writing, essays, book reviews, and feature projects. We will be reading between now and April 15, so get us your work soon! You can review our submissions guidelines at http://www.theoffendingadam.com/submit/ So we invite you to drop by this week to http://www.theoffendingadam.com/ as Issue 006 arrives.
.
Bookmark or add us to your reader so that you don't miss a single issue of content. And of course, we encourage you to pass the word of the launch along by passing along this message to anyone you think would be interested or post a note on facebook or a blog.
.
If you have any questions, comments, or concerns or if you want to contact us for any reason, please email us at editors@theoffendingadam.com.
.
The editors of The Offending Adam
Andrew Wessels
Cody Todd
Nik De Dominic
Ryan Winet
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